Geordie footballers’ wives want mansions on the posh estates just outside Newcastle upon Tyne. But if you are a woman who has made her money from football by her own hard graft, you find something a bit more original.

When Newcastle United football club floated on the stock exchange in 1997, Jo Dixon, then the club’s financial director, found herself with a £100,000 bonus burning a hole in her pocket. And there, almost next door to her village home, was a huge, boarded-up pub just begging to drink up all that cash and re-emerge as the fine Georgian townhouse it was meant to be.

Today, Dixon’s statuesque 6ft form just fits beneath the wide but low 1806 doorframes that lead to where the bar used to be, an area that is now the music room and drawing room.

From the bow windows, you can see the market square of Allendale, a pretty Northumberland village about 45 minutes’ drive west of Newcastle. And in 1998, at those same bow windows, its owner could see hundreds of local eyes desperate to know what Newcastle-born Dixon — who had lived a few doors down since 1995 — was going to do with their “Hotty”, as the Hotspur hotel, which had finally called time some eight months before, was known.

Dixon paid £78,000 for the boarded-up Hotty: it was a gamble, as she didn’t have planning permission for a change of use. Though she won it, luck was on her side, as the building was one of the last pubs in Northumberland allowed to be converted. What was in her favour was that it had originally been a house.

When she took possession, it was still full of pub fixtures and fittings — everything from tables and chairs to barrels and pipes. Dixon, who likes novel solutions to problems, told local charity fundraisers they could auction off the contents and keep the money if, in return, they moved her furniture into the attic from her old house. “They made £1,800, and I saved the cost of a removal van,” she says and laughs.

In May 1998, she quit the club, where she had been since 1995, and swapped designer clothes for a boiler suit to oversee her new home’s restoration.

With planning approved, she had huge fun ripping off hardboard to reveal original early Georgian doors and pulling up carpets to find a mosaic hall floor beneath. “Behind the bar, it was so smelly and horrid,” she recalls, nose wrinkling. “The first stage was to get rid of the horrors — beer-stained carpets and a nasty 1960s extension at the back that had been a pool room and lavatories.”

When the kitchen ceiling was taken down, she spotted a fire basket partly hidden by a wall above. Once excavated, this turned out to be a superbly decorated cast-iron affair from 1806, which is now in the dining room.

Most of the work, at a total cost of £180,000, was completed in five months, ending at Christmas time 1998 with parties for the project team and villagers.

Dixon says finding a good local builder was the key: “If I had to do a similar exercise in London, it would be verging on the impossible to find the right people.”

When the extension came down, a local farmer turned up just begging to take away the hard core for nothing: “In London, it would have been an enormous cost for all the skips.” The whole complex mix of bow, flat and bay windows in this wide, three-storey house was replaced by a local joiner.

Today, the property is homely but elegant. In the kitchen, there’s a 1950s Aga, a huge old butchers’ slab, and crockery is stored in salvaged shop fittings. An antique map drawer has been utilised as a receptacle for cutlery and table linen.

Squashy sofas nestle invitingly in the bay windows of the property’s three reception rooms, and there are various seating alcoves scattered throughout. Most of the seven cosy but spacious bedrooms have simple, wooden floorboards. In one of the three bathrooms, a vast cast-iron bath, ideal for a tall woman, stands in a big, well-curtained window. “My sister nearly drowned in it,” says Dixon.

She opens a first-floor door to reveal what she calls “the engine room”, a big laundry with the shiny, white machines she didn’t want in the kitchen. It’s all very organised, but this is not a singleton’s palace of perfection: Dixon, 46, is unmarried and has no children, but with two sisters and two brothers, and eight nieces and nephews, her home is perfect as a venue for family gatherings.

In 1999, Dixon “shook the dust out of my hair and got out my suits again” and went back to work. She is now a non-executive director for three companies and splits her time between her boyfriend’s home in Provence and Allendale. The commute to the Provence home takes seven hours in all, so Hotspur House is on the market, although Dixon is keeping another property near the village, an idyllic two-bedroom cottage. This was a wreck when she bought it for £58,000 three years ago, soaking up more money in restoration than she is prepared to admit.

Andrew Young, of estate agency George F White, the firm handling the sale, expects Hotspur House to attract a family that wants to escape city life and who can work, at least partly, from home. A big house with a decent garden in a quiet place for £500,000 seems a bargain, and there is, it seems, no catch — unless you like completely shiny interiors and double garages.

But there are lots of other pretty places slightly nearer Newcastle that command higher prices because, bizarrely to anyone in the south of England, many Geordies don’t see Allendale as commutable. Dixon says: “When I first moved here, nobody worked in the city, but that is slowly changing.” And Young adds: “If this house were in the town of Hexham, just 10 miles further in, it would be £200,000 more.”

There is plenty of money around, says Young. “Professionals have always had money but, increasingly, we are seeing more self-made money, including plumbers, builders and electricians.” Dixon agrees: “Newcastle is a vibrant economic area with a lot of new entrepreneurs.” Certainly, her projects have helped put money in local pockets.

Hotspur House is for sale for £500,000 with George F White, 01434 674 244, www.georgefwhite.co.uk

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